Naomi Chavez, an internal consultant for Cisco Systems, i of Silicon Valley's leading network-equipment manufacturers, is frustrated: "We have the most ineffective meetings of any visitor I've e'er seen."

Kevin Eassa, vice president of operations for the disk sectionalisation of Conner Peripherals, some other Silicon Valley giant, is realistically resigned: "Nosotros realize our meetings are unproductive. A consulting house is trying to help us, and we recollect they've hitting the marking. Only we've got a long way to get."

Richard Collard, senior director of network operations at Federal Limited, is merely exasperated: "Nosotros but seem to come across and see and come across and nosotros never seem to do anything."

Meetings are the about universal — and universally despised — part of business life. But bad meetings practise more than ruin an otherwise pleasant day. William R. Daniels, senior consultant at American Consulting & Training of Mill Valley, California, has introduced meeting-improvement techniques to companies including Applied Materials and Motorola. He is adamant about the real stakes: bad meetings brand bad companies.

"Meetings thing because that's where an system's culture perpetuates itself," he says. "Meetings are how an organization says, 'You are a fellow member.' So if every 24-hour interval nosotros go to tedious meetings total of irksome people, then nosotros can't help but call up that this is a boring visitor. Bad meetings are a source of negative letters near our company and ourselves."

It'southward non supposed to exist this style. In a business world that is faster, tougher, leaner, and more downsized than ever, you might expect the sheer demands of competition (not to mention the impact of e-mail and groupware) to curb our appetite for meetings. In reality, the reverse may be true. Equally more than work becomes teamwork, and fewer people remain to do the work that exists, the number of meetings is probable to increase rather than decrease. Jon Ryburg, president of the Facility Performance Grouping in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is an organizational psychologist who advises companies on office pattern and "meeting ergonomics." He tells his clients that they demand twice equally much coming together space as they did 20 years ago. The reason? "More and more companies are team-based companies, and in team-based companies virtually work gets washed in meetings."

A diverseness of tools and techniques (plus a healthy dose of mutual sense) tin can make meetings less painful, more productive, maybe even fun. In that location's as well an of import role for engineering, although the undeniable power of computer-enabled meeting systems usually comes with astronomical price tags. Still, there's lots to larn from electronic "meetingware" even if y'all never buy information technology. What follows is Fast Company'southward guide to the seven sins of mortiferous meetings and, more of import, seven steps to salvation.

Sin #1: People don't take meetings seriously. They arrive belatedly, leave early on, and spend most of their time doodling.

Salvation: Adopt Intel'south heed-set that meetings are real piece of work.

At that place are as many techniques to improve the "crispness" of meetings every bit there are items on the typical meeting agenda. Some companies punish latecomers with a punishment fee or reprimand them in the minutes of the meeting. But these techniques address symptoms, not the disease. Disciplined meetings are about mind-set — a shared conviction amongst all the participants that meetings are real piece of work. That all-too-frequent expression of relief — "Meeting's over, permit's get back to piece of work" — is the mortal enemy of good meetings.

"Most people simply don't view going to meetings every bit doing work," says William Daniels. "You lot have to make your meetings uptime rather than downtime."

Is there a visitor with the correct listen-set? Daniels nominates Intel, the semiconductor manufacturer famous for its managerial toughness and crisp execution. Walk into any conference room at whatsoever Intel mill or office anywhere in the world and you will see on the wall a poster with a series of simple questions about the meetings that take place there. Do you lot know the purpose of this coming together? Do yous have an agenda? Practice you know your role? Do you follow the rules for good minutes?

These posters are a visual reminder of just how serious Intel is about productive meetings. Indeed, every new employee, from the nearly junior production worker to the highest ranking executive, is required to take the company's home-grown form on effective meetings. For years the course was taught by CEO Andy Grove himself, who believed that good meetings were such an important part of Intel'due south culture that it was worth his time to train the troops. "We talk a lot about meeting subject area," says Michael Fors, corporate training manager at Intel Academy. "It isn't complicated. It's doing the nuts well: structured agendas, clear goals, paths that you lot're going to follow. These things make a huge difference."

Sin #two: Meetings are too long. They should attain twice equally much in half the time.

Salvation: Time is money. Track the price of your meetings and utilize computer- enabled simultaneity to brand them more productive.

Nigh every guru invokes the same dominion: meetings should last no longer than 90 minutes. When's the concluding fourth dimension your company held to that rule?

One reason meetings drag on is that people don't capeesh how expensive they are. James B. Rieley, director of the Center for Continuous Quality Improvement at the Milwaukee Surface area Technical College, recently decided to modify all that. He did a survey of the college's 130-person management council to find out how much time its members spent in meetings. When he multiplied their time by their salaries, he adamant that the college was spending $3 one thousand thousand per year on direction-quango meetings lone. Money talks: later on Rieley'south study came out, the college trained 40 people every bit facilitators to keep meetings on track. Bernard DeKoven, founder of the Institute for Amend Meetings in Palo Alto, California, has gone Rieley 1 stride better. He'due south developed software called the Meeting Meter that allows any team or department to calculate, on a running basis, how much their meetings cost. Later someone inputs the names and salaries of meeting participants, the program starts ticking. Recall of it equally a national debt clock for meetings.

DeKoven emphasizes that he created the Meeting Meter as a conversation piece rather than as a serious management tool. It's a visible style to put meeting productivity on the agenda. "When I employ the meter, I don't just talk nearly the cost of meetings," he says, "I talk about the cost of bad meetings. Because bad meetings pb to even more meetings, and over time the costs get awe-inspiring."

Technology can do more merely keep meetings shorter. It tin also increase productivity — that is, help generate more ideas and decisions per minute. One of the main benefits of meetingware is that it allows participants to violate the offset rule of practiced behavior in nearly other circumstances: wait your plow to speak. With Ventana's GroupSystems 5, the almost powerful meeting software available today, participants enter their comments and ideas into workstations. The workstations organize the comments and project them onto a monitor for the whole group to see. Most everyone who has studied or participated in figurer-enabled meetings agrees that this capacity for simultaneity produces dramatic gains in the number of ideas and the speed with which they are generated.

Geoff Bywater, senior vice president of marketing and promotion for FoxMusic, recently organized a strategic retreat for the 170 meridian executives of 20th Century Trick Filmed Amusement. He used a computer arrangement supplied by CoVision, a San Francisco consulting firm that specializes in technology-enabled meetings. Apple PowerBooks outfitted with customized software allowed participants to answer to questions, suggest ideas, and vote on options — all at the aforementioned time.

"Nosotros had 170 of the brightest people in the company in 1 room," Bywater reports. "The challenge was, how much data and how many ideas could we go out of them? Fifty-fifty if we had divided into 15 breakout groups, we'd still have only fifteen people speaking at the same fourth dimension. People were amazed. If nosotros asked a question and each person typed in 2 ideas, that's nearly 350 ideas in five minutes! That was the biggest bear on of the technology – the number of ideas generated in such a brusk time."

Exist warned, though: electronic meetings tin can exist more productive than traditional meetings, only they're not always shorter. "The good news nigh computer-supported meetings is that the discussions tend non to be repetitive or redundant," says Michael Schrage, a consultant on collaborative technologies and the author of No More than Teams!, an influential guide to group work and meetings. "The bad news is that the meetings can go longer. The computer-supported environment encourages people to discuss things a little more thoroughly than they might otherwise."

Sin #3: People wander off the topic. Participants spend more time digressing than discussing.

Salvation: Become serious about agendas and store distractions in a "parking lot." Information technology'due south the starting point for all advice on productive meetings: stick to the agenda. But it'southward hard to stick to an agenda that doesn't exist, and most meetings in nearly companies are incomparably agenda-free. "In the real world," says Schrage, "agendas are near as rare as the white rhino. If they do exist, they're about every bit useful. Who hasn't been in meetings where someone tries to prove that the agenda isn't appropriate?"

Agendas are worth taking seriously. Intel is fanatical about them; it has developed an agenda "template" that everyone in the company uses. Much of the template is unsurprising. An Intel agenda (circulated several days earlier a coming together to let participants react to and modify information technology) lists the meeting'due south key topics, who will lead which parts of the give-and-take, how long each segment volition have, what the expected outcomes are, and so on.

Intel agendas as well specify the meeting's decision-making style. The company distinguishes among four approaches to decisions: authoritative (the leader has full responsibility); consultative (the leader makes a determination after weighing group input); voting; and consensus. Being clear and up-front end about decision styles, Intel believes, sets the right expectations and helps focus the conversation.

"Going into the meeting, people know how they're giving input and how that input will become rolled up into a decision," says Intel'south Michael Fors. "If you don't take structured agendas, and people aren't sure of the decision path, they'll bring up side bug that are related but not directly relevant to solving the problem."

Of class, even the best-crafted agendas can't guard confronting digressions, distractions, and the other foibles of man interaction. The challenge is to continue meetings focused without stifling creativity or insulting participants who stray. At Ameritech, the regional telephone visitor based in Chicago, meeting leaders use a "parking lot" to maintain that focus.

"When comments come that aren't related to the issue at hand, we record them on a flip chart labeled the parking lot," says Kimberly Thomas, director of communications for small business services. Merely the parking lot isn't a blackness hole. "We always track the issue and the person responsible for it," she adds. "We utilize this technique throughout the visitor."

Sin #4: Naught happens once the meeting ends. People don't convert decisions into action.

Salvation: Catechumen from "meeting" to "doing" and focus on mutual documents.

The problem isn't that people are lazy or irresponsible. Information technology's that people leave meetings with different views of what happened and what'south supposed to happen next. Meeting experts are unanimous on this point: even with the ubiquitous tools of organization and sharing ideas — whiteboards, flip charts, Post-it notes — the capacity for misunderstanding is unlimited. Which is another reason companies turn to computer technology.

The best way to avoid that misunderstanding is to convert from "meeting" to "doing" — where the "doing" focuses on the creation of shared documents that pb to action. The fact is, at most powerful part for technology is likewise the simplest: recording comments, outlining ideas, generating written proposals, projecting them for the entire group to run into, printing them and so people leave with real-time minutes. Forget groupware; just get yourself a good outlining plan and oversized monitor.

"Yous're not just having a meeting, you're creating a document," says Michael Schrage. " I can't emphasize plenty the importance of that distinction. It is the fundamental difference between ordinary meetings and figurer-augmented collaborations. Comments, questions, criticisms, insights should enhance the quality of the document. That should be the grouping'south mission."

In other words, the medium is the meeting. That'southward why Bernard DeKovan prefers computers to flip charts and whiteboards. "Flip charts create behaviors conditioned by the medium," he says. "People start competing for room on the flip nautical chart, the facilitator has to scratch thing out, and pretty soon you tin can't read what's on it. With a computer, yous never run out of room for ideas, you tin can edit indefinitely, y'all can generate hard copies for everyone at a moment's notice. It's a much richer medium."

Sin #5: People don't tell the truth. There'due south enough of conversation, but non much artlessness.

Salvation: Embrace anonymity.

We all know information technology's true: Too ofttimes, people in meetings simply don't speak their minds. Sometimes the problem is a leader who doesn't solicit participation. Sometimes a dominant personality intimidates the rest of the grouping. Only nigh of the time the trouble is a simple lack of trust. People don't feel secure enough to say what they actually recall.

The nigh powerful techniques to promote artlessness rely on technology, and most of these figurer-based tools focus on anonymity — enabling people to express opinions and evaluate alternatives without having to divulge their identities. Information technology'south a sobering commentary on gratis speech in business organization — "Say what you think, and we'll disguise your names to protect the innocent" — but it does seem to work.

Jay Nunamaker, CEO of Ventana Corporation, based in Tucson, Arizona, and a professor at the University of Arizona's Karl Eller Graduate Schoolhouse of Management, is a leading expert on electronic meetings. He says Ventana added anonymity to its software to run across the needs of the U.Due south. armed services. "Admirals can really dampen interaction at a meeting," he notes. "But we didn't realize the impact information technology would have in corporate settings. Even with people who work together all the fourth dimension, anonymity changes the social protocols. People say things differently." CoVision, the house that facilitated the 20th Century Fox coming together, provides a system that allows for anonymous voting and anonymous group conversations. Meeting participants enter comments onto laptops, and the comments are projected onto a screen without attribution. CoVision president Lenny Lind says the organization is specially powerful in meetings of loftier-ranking executives.

"People in the upper reaches of management pay so much deference to the leader, and have so much to lose, that conversations speedily become measured and political," he argues. "People just won't bare their souls. Anonymity changes that."

But there are problems with anonymity. Some people similar getting credit for their ideas, and anonymity tin can get out them feeling shortchanged. At that place are also opportunities for manipulation. Ballad Anne Ogdin of Deep Forest Technology, a teamwork consultant and meeting facilitator based in Santa Clara, California, calls anonymity a "minor idea that's been blown out of proportion." In particular, she worries nigh gamesmanship – for instance, people who build an anonymous groundswell of support for their own contributions.

Sin #half dozen: Meetings are always missing of import information, so they postpone disquisitional decisions.

Conservancy: Become data, not just furniture, into meeting rooms.

Most meeting rooms brand it harder to have good meetings. They're sterile and uninviting — and often in the middle of nowhere. Why? To assistance people "concentrate" by removing them from the frenzy of office life. But this isolation leaves meeting rooms out of the data flow. Often, the downside of isolation outweighs the benefits of focus.

Computer-services giant EDS has built a set of high-tech facilities that leave meetings participants awash in data. These much-heralded Capture Labs, electronic meeting rooms used by the company and its clients, may offer a glimpse of the coming together room of the hereafter.

The Capture Lab "is a self-contained information network," says Michael Bauer, a primary with EDS'south management consulting subsidiary. "Nosotros can bring in information from the Internet or from EDS'due south internal Web. We tin go information on stock prices, even about the weather if we're worried about shipping or travel. It'due south brought into the room, displayed on a screen, and talked nigh."

It's non necessary to become that far. Jon Ryburg, the meeting ergonomist, offers a few ways to increase the "information quotient" in meeting spaces. For i thing, let enough space in your meeting rooms for teams to store materials. Project teams generate lots more than minutes and memos. Meetings build models, make full flip charts, create artifacts of all sorts – "information" that's vital to hereafter meetings. "People are constantly hauling materials to and from meeting rooms," Ryburg says. "It'southward much easier to simply shop things for later meetings."

William Miller, director of research and business development for Steelcase, the office-furniture manufacturer based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, emphasizes that mobility is well-nigh more than than convenience. The radical redesign of piece of work, he argues, requires a radical redesign of meeting space.

"Knowledge workers spend 80% of their time at the office abroad from their desks," Miller says. "Where are they? Working on projects. The style to support that piece of work is to build project clusters and co-locate desks around them. You can postal service information and never take it down. We call it 'data persistence.' And we don't talk virtually meetings. We talk about 'interactions.' It's role of the new scientific discipline of constructive work."

Sin #7: Meetings never get better. People brand the same mistakes.

Salvation: Practice makes perfect. Monitor what works and what doesn't and hold people accountable.

Meetings are like any other part of business concern life: you get better only if yous commit to it — and aim high. Charles Schwab & Co., the financial-services company based in San Francisco, has made that commitment. In most every meeting at Schwab, someone serves every bit an "observer" and creates what the company calls a Plus/Delta list. The listing records what went correct and what went wrong, and gets included in the minutes. Over time, both for specific meeting groups and for the visitor as a whole, these lists create an calendar for change.

How much can meetings improve? The last give-and-take goes to Bernard DeKoven: "People don't have practiced meetings because they don't know what practiced meetings are similar. Proficient meetings aren't merely almost work. They're most fun — keeping people charged upward. Information technology'south more than collaboration, it's 'coliberation' — people freeing each other upwards to think more creatively."

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